What about moonraker?
Any mathematical estimates on the probability of launching 6 shuttles within an hour and all of them working as intended ?
Better luck next time Blofeld! Five Bond plot myths busted
Keep it simple – if only the villains of James Bond had learned that lesson in Evil Medical School. All too often, though, the Ernst Stavro Blofelds and Karl Strombergs of 007’s world succumb to their maniacal tendencies and plot ridiculously complicated plans to off Bond or take over the world, where a simple bullet or well- …
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Friday 26th October 2012 11:41 GMT Ryleh
Helicopters (one) can have eject systems!
I'm gonna be anal and say - Zero-zero eject systems were introduced in helicopters - actually just one type; Russian Designed Kamov Ka-52 Blackshark.
It's notably the fastest attack helicopter in service thanks to it coaxial rotor design that allowes for higher Vne (co-axial design compensates for retreating blade stall effect and lift asymetry) and the only attack helicopter that is crewed just by one member (rather then the conventional designs = pilot + gunner)
And that's why the ruskies put the ejection system in - the way it works - a explosive charge blows and releases the main rotor blades and then the pilot is ejected preventing the unfortunete sould from being chopped to little pieces two sets of composite blades rotating at 200rpm!
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Friday 26th October 2012 13:18 GMT Penguin
Re: Helicopters (one) can have eject systems!
I fear this is going to be a tad controversial with the rotor heads but it has to be said; The British Army don’t get all the best gear on the battlefield so I won’t let you take away their ‘Fastest helicopter in the world’ accolade despite the fact it is quite questionable.
Fully loaded with AT then yes, the KA-50 is faster. Yes, in a dive it is faster (I believe it has 15 – 16 mph higher do not exceed limit than the Lynx without BERP rotors) Yes, the KA-50 is a real attack helicopter as apposed to a sky truck with some TOW missiles bolted to the door.
But darn it! The Lynx is faster. I need to cling to these hopeless, irrelevant numbers to make me feel better.
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Tuesday 30th October 2012 23:13 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: Re: Helicopters (one) can have eject systems!
"....so I won’t let you take away their ‘Fastest helicopter in the world’ accolade despite the fact it is quite questionable....." OK, not EXACTLY a helicopter, but the Convair Pogo had rotors, could hit 610mph, it had an ejector seat, and all back in the Fifties! And it's one of my all-time-fave whacky aircraft designs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_XFY_Pogo
Now, if Larry Ellison was a REAL man, he'd be saying "Sod the MiG, gimme one of them Convairs!"
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Friday 26th October 2012 12:09 GMT Matt Bryant
Oi! Leave Goldeneye alone!
Frankly, they could have gremlins stealing a B2 for all I care, just as long as they kept the gorgeous Famke Janssen in the movie. Much hotter than the movie's Bond girl, Izabella Scorupco. Unfortunately, whilst Lois Chiles was pretty hot, even she couldn't save Moonraker's "plot" from ridicule.
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Friday 26th October 2012 12:13 GMT jai
The implausibility is what makes them enjoyable, no?
Isn't it the utterly outrageous nature of the evil schemes that makes the films so enjoyable. Everything about them is beyond belief, from the names of the love interests to Bond himself, that you have no choice but to suspend your disbelief by a large measure. And with that, you're willing to accept anything, and the film becomes a great thrill ride.
Afterall, the recent Daniel Craig films have been a bit more closer to reality than those films listed here, and arguably, weren't nearly so much fun.
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Friday 26th October 2012 13:20 GMT ChrisC
Re: The implausibility is what makes them enjoyable, no?
If you're a fan of the Bond universe as portrayed by most of the films, then probably yes.
If, however, you prefer the more steeped in reality Bond universe as portrayed in the original Fleming novels, and would prefer to see the film adaptations reflect this at least to some degree, then no, not really. As much as I've enjoyed most of the films as entertainment in their own right, I wouldn't say I've necessarily enjoyed them all as Bond films - it's really only the Dalton and Craig ones which IMO capture the essense of the written-word Bond.
I think Dalton's portrayal of Bond has been unfairly criticised as a result, with people comparing his films against the Connery/Moore collection and finding them rather dull, yet for me he was the first on-screen Bond who came close to matching up with the description from the novels. Craig has then taken it into a whole new level. OK, so I still haven't been able to watch Quantum of Solace without needing a break halfway to clear my head, but that's just down to the way the storyline flows (or doesn't, as the case may be) - as far as his portrayal of Bond goes, it's a continuation of what he started in Casino Royale, and I'm genuinely excited about Skyfall.
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Friday 26th October 2012 13:04 GMT rh587
Re: You missed another.
The "korean laser" was a orbital mirror reflecting and focussing sunlight, not a laser.
Of course that has it's own set of impracticalities, but you avoid the problems of sourcing a suitable power source, engineering for heat dissipation, etc that plagued Blofeld's diamond laser.
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Friday 26th October 2012 13:38 GMT Rodrigo Valenzuela
distance
What have always baffled me is the distance.
If you put a big laser in space, which as pointed in the article, is a major engineering challenge, would it be useful?
Doesn't the inverse square law applies to the laser beam?
At a distance of, say, 2000 kilometers, for a low earth orbiting satellite, you need a lot of power to inflict damage.
And that is assuming the target is right below the satellite. Add to that the atmosphere.
And to that, add the precision of the mechanism to keep the beam on target... mmm.
Nope, laser beams orbiting the earth are, in my opinion, worthless as weapons.
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Friday 26th October 2012 14:46 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: distance
>Doesn't the inverse square law applies to the laser beam?
Yes but it's not such a big effect.
If you had a little 6inch telescope with a diffraction limit of 1arc-sec then from LEO at 200km you would put a spot about 1m (in ideal case), launch a Hubble size mirror and you can focus it down to about 1/20 of that = 2inches.
Sunlight is about 1000w/m^2 so your 1MegaWatt Acme space laser would be about 200,000x brighter than daylight
The atmosphere doesn't have much effect looking down. The distortion puts an angle shift into the light, so if you are looking at a distant star a fraction of degree movement is big, but if you target is only a few km below the atmospheric turbulence layer it's not such a big deal.
Pointing accurately to 1arc-sec even blind is trivial, with star trackers we can point the Hubble to 1/100 of that.
But on the whole the best way of killing somebody with a laser still remains dropping it on their head.
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Friday 26th October 2012 15:17 GMT Ru
Re: distance
A 550nm wavelength laser pointed at a target 2000km away and using a 10m reflector has a minimum possible focus spot size of ~10cm diameter. I reckon it'll lose a good 50% of its output energy firing though the atmosphere, and probably won't accomplish a whole lot though cloud or dust storms. Still, if you've got good enough optics to focus the beam down that far, you don't have to throw many tens megawatts out of the business end of your laser to chop holes in even quite tough targets (say, a tank) in a second or two.
It won't, however, be a city razing ravening beam o' death. You'll get results a little more like a precision drone strike... it'll take out a car, or a plane, or a person but it won't level a block of flats. Dropping rocks out of orbit is more appropriate for that.
The technology for this isn't that far off. I kinda hope we'll be using it for laser launch systems to get stuff in to orbit cheaply rather than frying each other, however.
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Friday 26th October 2012 13:53 GMT Daedalus
One small quibble
Nuclear EMP requires detonation in the ionosphere, because it works by catching the ions in the shockwave to generate the pulse. EMP occurs in atmospheric blasts but it is much reduced. Hence when you nuke a city you don't need as much EMP protection. And frankly, the designers of early delivery aircraft may not have cared that much. The expected return rate from missions was pretty low, and there may not have been anything to return to.
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Friday 26th October 2012 20:46 GMT Azzy
Re: So which plots were plausible?
Gun made of gold? Probably only for a few shots, if at all. Gold isn't very strong.
Gold-plated guns have certainly been made, though, and I assume this is what Bond uses. I think Gadaffi had gold plated vanity guns, and other Arab dictators probably do too (they'd never want to be left behind in an arms-decoration race, right?)
Cocaine base (ie, crack) is soluble in petrol (and just about any other non-polar solvent), powder cocaine is not. They use kerosene or gasoline (hopefully unleaded) in the production of cocaine from coca plants, for this purpose...
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Friday 26th October 2012 15:17 GMT Matthew 3
Valves?
I recall being taught (at a very young age so I'm probably hopelessly wrong on the detail) that the Allies captured some Japanese aircraft during WW2 which had gone back to valve technology in order to avoid the EMP risk of a nuclear strike. Is this complete bollocks or was the story true?
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Friday 26th October 2012 16:03 GMT phuzz
Re: Valves?
Well, at the time there was not really any technology more advanced than valves, and pretty much no one had any idea about EMPs from nuclear bombs, what with there not being any nuclear bombs (until right at the very end of the war), so, yes, that's complete bollocks, sorry.
However, I have heard the same about soviet technology from the cold war (eg the Mig-25), but that might also be due to their lack of decent transistor based tech.
(ps, I found more information searching for 'vacuum tubes' rather than 'valves')
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Friday 26th October 2012 15:19 GMT Oninoshiko
Am I the only one that
can't unsee a collapsable colander every time they see that satellite?
When I was a tyke my grandmother had one, and I used to play with it sometimes (as we were want to do, since this was before everyone had a supercomputer to play with). So it's been that to me since the first time I saw it.
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Friday 26th October 2012 16:03 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Realistic Bond plot
Bond arrives for work at M's secret headquarters - the big building on the Thames with the 60ft flashing tourist sign saying "secret military inteligence HQ"
Ah Bond - we have a special job for you.
We want you to go down to files, pull out all the stories about Arthur Scargil being a Soviet agent paid by Libya, change the name to Alex Salmond and leak them to the Daily Mail.
Go and see Q I hear he has developed some magical liquid allowing you to change things on a typewriter.
Afraid I can't says Bond flicking a speck of dust from his C&A casual bry-nylon slacks. I have to attend a course on updating health and safety requirements on working with paper clips in an office environment to meet the new civil service guidelines.
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Friday 26th October 2012 18:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. pentodes
Interesting.
Tek stuff used these cute things called "nuvistors" which were basically a micro can valve.
Often wondered whether a VFD based radio would be able to transmit if connected to a decent aerial and ground, if so how far?
That would be a cool hack, as dead video recorders and hi-fis are an effective source for these useful pieces of technology.
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Friday 26th October 2012 19:54 GMT laird cummings
Nuclear pedantry
"...you would need to somehow ram the whole reactor core down into a subcritical mass in a tiny fraction of a second, the way a warhead does."
That would be a *super*critical mass. Subcritical masses just sit there and do nothing terribly interesting. It's all about critical goemetry - And a core designed to generate use power levels is *very* hard to get to go 'bang.' Excepting in the mundane 'steam expolosion' manner. Which would hardly suit a Bond villian.
Mine's the canary-yellow one with lead lining. Cheers!
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Saturday 27th October 2012 07:26 GMT Random Yayhoo
"Laser them from Space"
@OrsonX:
"...just laser the nutters from space? We could have got Saddam and saved invading Iraq twice..."
Why space? Don't you get warm feelings from Predators? (Sorry.) The F-35's engine was designed to generate sufficient electrical power to operate antipersonnel directed-energy weapons. I expect that the current 700kg, ~10kW SS laser weapons are sufficient for light(sic) headaches within the "tactical range" (some kilometers) from which those weapons lit off artillery rounds in recent US tests. I expect there shall be capability in a decade (perhaps now), using a long-range UAV, to silently disable any person on earth whose position is above the surface and known. This will be merely another cold incarnation of Ray Bradbury's "mechanical hound" from Farenheit 451.
"...We could vaporize Ahmadinejad..."
Or, for artistic effect, inscribe "Haircut by Raytheon" on his noggin.
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Sunday 28th October 2012 17:52 GMT Entropiated
Here, here for the ionosphere
As a poster has previously stated, to be effective as an EMP weapon, a nuke must be detonated in the ionopshere. The result will be a shower of high-energy electrons that will destroy any unshielded electronics. As for "not EMPing the bomber," that's not a problem because a nuclear warhead isn't usually detonated until it is a couple thousand feet (or less) off the ground.
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Monday 29th October 2012 16:14 GMT The Grump
new Bond movie
In the new Bond movie "Hard Rain", the BOFH has finally had enough. Using his knowledge of IT systems, he manages to steal his boss's identity, transfer a billion dollars to his boss's bank account from corporations and governments around the world. He uses the money to build his own space shuttle, infilitrate the ISS, kill everyone aboard, and begin building his superweapon - a mass driver to rain astroid death on London, and ultimately the world, unless they give control of all IT systems to his cloud servers on the ISS - for a small service charge of one hundred million a year.
This Bond film will star the oldest actor to play the 007 agent, Ben Stein. "My name is Bonnnnnd. James Bonnnnnd". The movie opens with a shootout on the top of the London Eye. Explosives shear the ferris wheel from it's axle, sending Bond on a deadly ride through the streets of London while running on the top of the wheel.
Coming to a theatre near you. Maybe.
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Monday 5th November 2012 09:04 GMT psuedonymous
Atomic tomfoolery
Actually, there ARE nuclear directed energy weapons, or more like nuclear 'shaped charges' really: look up 'Casaba Howitzer', an offshoot of the specially designed gadgets for Project Orion. Basically, jamb a truncated cone of Beryllium oxide onto your device, top it with a thin disk of metal (e.g. Titanium), and that disk get's turned into a narrow lance of high velocity superheated plasma.
I suppose by carefully manipulating the orientation of this beam (or beams, you can shoot out a few of these from each device) with respect the the Earth's magnetic field as it sprays out charged particles you could maybe focus the resulting EMP somewhat, but you'd still need to deal with the EMP generated by the nuclear initiation itself, and I doubt you could focus it nearly as well as the 'Goldeneye' does.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
